“I love you;” three of the most beautiful words in the English language. But in the end there are still only three of them, and stretching them out for 99 minutes was bound to get a little tedious after a while.
Joel Allen Schroeder’s love note to cartoonist Bill Watterson, aptly named Dear Mr. Watterson, illustrates the filmmaker’s obvious affection for the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes. If you grew up reading the adventures of an iconoclastic six-year-old and his stuffed tiger, utterly alive but only to Calvin, then you probably share his enthusiasm. Watterson’s strips were dynamically drawn, freakishly imaginative, and presented youngsters with emotions and philosophical concepts that parents generally kept at bay from their kids until they were old enough to respond with angst, rather than genuine empathy or proper consideration.
As a child of Watterson myself – inspired to read, to daydream, to ponder life’s mysteries and to instinctively accept so-called “pop” art as the real thing – I can’t help but mirror Schroeder’s sentiment. As a fan letter, Dear Mr. Watterson feels like it should be signed by all of us and dropped anonymously on the cartoonist’s doorstep, in the hopes that he watches it and smiles, and realizes that he’s done the world quite a big favor.
As a documentary, however, it’s not particularly notable. As evocative as Dear Mr. Watterson may be of existing fans’ continued reverence for Calvin & Hobbes, it’s bound to baffle neophytes who – depressingly – will have no idea who the characters are. One would hope that they would then pick up on Schroeder’s overwhelmingly positive assessment of Watterson’s creation – or at least adequately process the glowing raves of Watterson’s interviewed contemporaries Berkely Breathed (Bloom County) and Bill Amend (FoxTrot) – and decide to pick up a still readily-available collection to discover Calvin & Hobbes for themselves.
That would certainly be well and good, but unfortunately there’s just not much of a reason for Calvin & Hobbes newcomers to watch Dear Mr. Watterson. It preaches to the converted. Worse, the converted already know most of the information that Schroeder presents about Watterson’s career, his famed reclusiveness, and his steadfast refusal to turn Calvin & Hobbes into a merchandising empire that surely would have rivaled Garfield and Peanuts in its ubiquity on mugs, t-shirts and stuffed animal displays across the country, if not the entire world.
Had Schroeder used Watterson’s uncommon dedication to the principles of his art – at the impressive sacrifice of untold riches from marketing tie-ins – as a launch pad to examine the still-relevant issue of artists “selling out” at the risk of diluting their creation’s artistic value, then he might have had something. Instead, the focus remains resolutely on Watterson’s genius; Watterson, who (as one would expect) does not appear in this film. Now that would have been a selling point.
But at least Schroeder clearly respects Bill Watterson’s desire to remain off the radar… something that couldn’t be said for the year’s “other” reclusive, influential writer documentary Salinger, which exploited the mystique surrounding the author of The Catcher in the Rye for cheap and phony melodrama. This respect yields fewer revelations about Dear Mr. Watterson‘s subject than Salinger does, of course, making it less informative than it really should be. But by refusing to turn his subject into a commodity, at least Schroeder remains thematically faithful to Watterson’s principles. If only he had captured more of Watterson’s infectious creativity, his penchant for contemplation, or his artistic flare. I think that would have warmed Mr. Watterson’s heart – and ours – all the more.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
